Mountaintop mining decisions loom

The Obama administration is facing a string of politically difficult decisions over one of the country’s most contentious environmental issues: mountaintop removal coal mining.

Few issues can generate equivalent outrage among the administration’s environmentalist allies as does mountaintop removal, a mining technique common in West Virginia and other Appalachian states where operators use explosives to open mountaintops and access coal seams, and then dump the resulting waste in adjacent streams.

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Green groups say the practice is among the worst abuses of the fossil fuel industry, saying it is ruining Appalachia’s ecosystems and poisoning its drinking water supplies.

But Appalachia’s mining industry calls itself the economic lifeline to one of the country’s poorest regions. The industry says it provides high-paying jobs that require no college degree, and mountaintop removal mining ensures those jobs will stay in Appalachia by keeping coal the cheapest source of power around.

Coal mining is also a part of the Appalachian identity, and many are fiercely hostile to what are perceived as outsiders telling the states what they ought to do with their own resources. A popular bumper sticker in West Virginia reads: “Save a Coal Miner, Kill a Tree Hugger.”

But so far under the Obama banner, the tree huggers have won one victory after another.

The latest came Thursday when the Environmental Protection Agency pulled the plug on the massive proposed Spruce No. 1 mine in southern West Virginia, revoking a Clean Water Act permit for the mine that the Bush administration approved in 2007.

The veto follows new rules from the EPA last year that increased water quality standards to the point where it would ban filling streams with waste in nearly all cases, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said. And in 2009, EPA froze 79 mine applications to subject them to “enhanced environmental review.”

EPA’s moves have cemented Jackson’s hero status among environmental groups – the Sierra Club launched a web campaign last week asking its members to send her thank you notes for “saving mountains” – but they have also left the agency and White House in a difficult situation.

The incremental crackdown has whetted the appetites of environmental groups who are demanding that the administration take the next step to ban mountaintop mining entirely.

“There will be pressure on every decision that the administration makes on this issue,” said Natural Resources Defense Council water attorney Jon Devine.

And unless it imposes a comprehensive ban, the Obama’s team will face that pressure over and over and over again. The agency still has to make decisions on 31 of the 79 frozen mine applications – each one its own political stink bomb. (A handful of the 79 have been approved, while dozens have been withdrawn.)

Instead of regulating, negotiating and litigating the 31 out one at a time, the administration should moot the discussion with a comprehensive ban on all mountaintop removal coal mining, Devine said.